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No need to push on any further: yet, though there is no more that you
can do of yourself, there is much that may and must be done to you. The
place that you have come to seems strange and bewildering, for it lies far
beyond the horizons of human thought. There are no familiar land-
marks, nothing on which you can lay hold. You "wander to and fro," as
the mystics say, "in this fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence and
darkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air. Like those who go to live
in new latitudes, you must become acclimatised. Your state, then, should
now be wisely passive; in order that the great influences which surround
you may take and adjust your spirit, that the unaccustomed light, which
now seems to you a darkness, may clarify your eyes, and that you may
be transformed from a visitor into an inhabitant of that supernal Country
which St. Augustine described as "no mere vision, but a home."
You are therefore to let yourself go; to cease all conscious, anxious
striving and pushing. Finding yourself in this place of darkness and
quietude, this "Night of the Spirit," as St. John of the Cross has called it,
you are to dwell there meekly; asking nothing, seeking nothing, but with
your doors flung wide open towards God. And as you do thus, there will
come to you an ever clearer certitude that this darkness enveils the goal
for which you have been seeking from the first; the final Reality with
which you are destined to unite, the perfect satisfaction of your most ar-
dent and most sacred desires. It is there, but you cannot by your efforts
reach it. This realisation of your own complete impotence, of the resist-
ance which the Transcendent long sought and faithfully served now
seems to offer to your busy outgoing will and love, your ardour, your
deliberate self-donation, is at once the most painful and most essential
phase in the training of the human soul. It brings you into that state of
passive suffering which is to complete the decentralisation of your
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character, test the purity of your love, and perfect your education in
humility.
Here, you must oppose more thoroughly than ever before the instincts
and suggestions of your separate, clever, energetic self; which, hating si-
lence and dimness, is always trying to take the methods of Martha into
the domain of Mary, and seldom discriminates between passivity and
sloth. Perhaps you will find, when you try to achieve this perfect self-
abandonment, that a further, more drastic self-exploration, a deeper,
more searching purification than that which was forced upon you by
your first experience of the recollective state is needed. The last frag-
ments of selfhood, the very desire for spiritual satisfaction the funda-
mental human tendency to drag down the Simple Fact and make it ours,
instead of offering ourselves to it must be sought out and killed. In this
deep contemplation, this profound Quiet, your soul gradually becomes
conscious of a constriction, a dreadful narrowness of personality;
something still existing in itself, still tending to draw inwards to its own
centre, and keeping it from that absolute surrender which is the only
way to peace. An attitude of perfect generosity, complete submission,
willing acquiescence in anything that may happen even in failure and
death is here your only hope: for union with Reality can only be a uni-
on of love, a glad and humble self-mergence in the universal life. You
must, so far as you are able, give yourself up to, "die into," melt into the
Whole; abandon all efforts to lay hold of It. More, you must be willing
that it should lay hold of you. "A pure bare going forth," says Tauler, try-
ing to describe the sensations of the self at this moment. "None," says
Ruysbroeck, putting this same experience, this meek outstreaming of the
bewildered spirit, into other language, "is sure of Eternal Life, unless he
has died with his own attributes wholly into God."
It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utter self-
surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken from you, nothing
given in exchange. But if you are able to make it, a mighty transforma-
tion will result. From the transitional plane of darkness, you will be re-
born into another "world," another stage of realisation: and find yourself,
literally, to be other than you were before. Ascetic writers tell us that the
essence of the change now effected consists in the fact that "God's action
takes the place of man's activity" that the surrendered self "does not act,
but receives." By this they mean to describe, as well as our concrete lan-
guage will permit, the new and vivid consciousness which now invades
the contemplative; the sense which he has of being as it were helpless in
the grasp of another Power, so utterly part of him, so completely
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different from him so rich and various, so transfused with life and feel-
ing, so urgent and so all-transcending that he can only think of it as
God. It is for this that the dimness and steadily increasing passivity of
the stage of Quiet has been preparing him; and it is out of this willing
quietude and ever-deepening obscurity that the new experiences come.
"O night that didst lead thus,
O night more lovely than the dawn of light,
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